The last two releases of Test-Simple (0.68 and 0.69) break on perls before 5.8. The reason is the, seemingly innocent, change to Test::Builder->is_fh() to use ->isa() instead of UNIVERSAL::isa(). This means things like UNIVERSAL::isa($non_object, "GLOB") don't work any more. Its not as bad as it looks in the tests, the situation which breaks is passing a reference to a tied filehandle to the TB->output methods. Pretty rare but it does make the tests puke their guts out. [1] And I now realize that UNIVERSAL::isa($non_object, "GLOB") is pretty stupid and I can just check with ref. [2] Ok, new release coming. [1] http://youtube.com/watch?v=_9UlxZfDmoA [2] If anyone complains about the flaws in ref I'm going to make them drink Ipecac.